Madame Secretary

Once A Refugee, She Favors Intervention To Fight Evil

(CBS)  At 11 p.m. on a rainy winter night as most of Washington was heading off to bed, one 63-year-old grandmother was heading off to work.

In eight hours, Scretary of State Madeleine Albright would touch down in Vienna for a meeting of some 50 foreign ministers.

A four-foot long couch is the not-so-fancy private bedroom of the secretary's 757.

There she has spent as many hours as it takes to travel nearly a million miles to some 40 countries this year alone. It's great fun, if you don't care much about sightseeing, eating or especially sleeping.

"People have asked...how can I keep the hours that I do, and why I'm not jetlagged? But basically it's because all my life, I've loved foreign policy," she tells 48 Hours Correspondent Susan Spencer.

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"There has not been one moment...where I've been jaded about it. And I still to my dying day will think, 'Can you believe it? She was actually secretary of state,'" she confides.

"As I walk through the State Department, and I see all those portraits of white men, and I think about the fact that they're going to have to hang one of somebody in a skirt," she says.

She has come a long way from the day when, at 11, she arrived in America, the daughter of a Czech diplomat. Her family fled Hitler then Stalin. She says that molded how she sees the world.

"Unless you fight evil and are aggressive about it, nothing happens," she says. "And that's the lesson out of my background...and why I understand the importance that America plays in the world."

After attending college Albright married, had three kids, and went through a painful divorce. At 39, she got her first full-time job working for Senator Edmund Muskie.

Only four years ago, she says, she learned for the first time, that she was Jewish - something that her parents had hidden.

"There's a synogogue in Prague, where all the names of people that...died during the Holocaust are listed," she says. "And they showed me the names of my three grandparents, and that was pretty emotional...to know that thanks to my parents, our names were not on that wall. They would have been on that wall, if my parents had not taken me away," she says.

Kosovo was a stark reminder of her past when Serbian leader Slobodon Milosovic waged genocidal war on ethnic Albanians.

She admits she's thin-skinned and hearing detractors call the Kosovo bombing "Madeleine's war" hurt at the time.

"The fact that the Serbian people now have a freely elected president who has just rejoined the international community...is worth it," she declares.

She has a staff of eight women and occasionally refers to this as "chicks in charge."

"All women kind of feel that every day they have to do a superior job," Albright says.

"Because in some way or another, by somebody, I am reminded of the fact that I'm a woman in a man's world," Albrigt adds.

It would be hard to miss but the secretary clearly revels in being a role model and in being female - from her office to her car.

There she carries "water, a comb, a pen, makeup,...dollars in case I need mad money," or cab fare, she says.

She tries not to take herself too seriously and likes to use humor to make a serious point. Hence her famous brooch collection.

"It's a peace pin," she calls one. "Because it has two doves on it. And I'm seeing Chairman Arafat, so I usually try to wear something with peace."

Some might say she goes out of her way to not hide any feminine side. "I like being a woman and I figure I use everything I have," she says, laughing.

That may explain the curtseys before powerful Senate committees. "She's been known to flirt from time to time," says Wendy Sherman, one of the top women advisers the secretary recruited.

But how do you explain her dancing in North Korea, of all places? And a few years ago, as U.N. ambassador, she took the floor for a macarena lesson.

"I've decided that it's very important to present America, which is what I'm doing, as human," she says. "I'm pretty spontaneous. And I think it's taken me 63 years, but I know who I am."

And so, it seems, does everyone else.

In the heart of Vienna, operating on just four hours of sleep, she works the crowd like a rock star.

"I literally have, sometimes, this out of body experience, just thinking, well Madeleine Albright is a person," Albright says, "who is secretary of state."

"And then there is the person who comes home from work, ...and nobody would believe this but I go and I put on my flannel nightgown, have cottage cheese, and go and watch television. And that's Madeleine."

But there was no TV on the night after 23 hours, nine meetings and one speech, as she jetted out Vienna and was due back in Washington to host a star-studded dinner at the State Department.

"I love makeup and I need it tonight...because I just got off the plane," she says.

What does she think would her father, a diplomat, would say about Madeleine Albright?

"'Well, you get an A,'" she says. "I think he'd would be very pleased with what I've done."

"This is the greatest country in the world. It has given people, like me, an opportunity that is unparalleled. And I think I tell the American story by having been somebody who came here as a refugee, who ended up as secretary of state," she says. "It's not as much my story as it's the story of America."

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